Finding Something that Hasn’t Changed

As a young missionary, I arrived in Brazil on May 3^rd, 1967 and my first assignment was to Ponta Grossa, in Paraná, a city just a couple of hours northwest of Curitiba. We spent the first night in the mission home and then the next day we were sent to our assignments. There was another elder, with considerable time in Brazil, who was also going to Ponta Grossa, and he was on the same bus with me. I got on the bus first, and it was mostly empty, so I selected a seat part way down one side and sat down. The other elder got on the bus and took a seat a couple of rows in front of me, and on the other side of the aisle. At the time, I was a bit miffed that he didn’t come sit by me. It was only later that I realized that we had assigned seats on the bus and that I was lucky that someone didn’t come to complain that I was in their seat.

We got to Ponta Grossa late enough that it was totally dark, and the other elder got us both in a taxi and gave the driver the address on my transfer. We drove down one of the main streets from the park next to the bus station and then turned off on Rua Tenente Pinto Duarte, looking for number 516. The numbers were only in the 300’s or some such thing when the road ran out. There was a deep gulley in front of us and we could see lights across the way, so the driver made a loop to get on the other side. We found the same road, but the numbers were now in the 700’s. There were no lights at all down in that gulley.

Then we drove a bit further and realized that the numbers were now going down and not up as they had been before. So a couple of blocks up the street, there was 516. So I got my suitcase out of the trunk, and we went and knocked on the door. At first there was no answer. Then finally a very young girl came to the window and talked to us. She wouldn’t let us in. The elders had gone. They took their suitcases and left.

So we got back in the taxi, and drove to the address the other elder had been given – the address of the district leader. At that place the lady who opened the door welcomed us and sent us upstairs, to wait for the elders who were not yet there. When they got back, my companion was with them. It turned out the little girl was partly right. The elder I replaced had left that morning, and both he and my companion had walked out the door carrying his suitcases.

So we walked back to the house. I had all of my things in that one heavy suitcase (close to the 66 pound limit), and I remember it as being quite a long walk that time. The house was little. Our room had a pair of bunk beds, two desks, a wardrobe and a bookcase. The beds were along one wall and stuck out into the doorway, so the door had been taken off and we had a curtain instead. The wardrobe covered part of my desk, so I couldn’t open the desk drawer. There was one other bedroom where the owner, his wife and two children slept, a small entry area with a couch where the little girl (a shirttail relative of some sort) slept, and a kitchen. The bathroom was outside and down the back steps. The bathroom was actually quite large, perhaps as large as our room, but the facilities consisted of a toilet and a chuveiro – an electric showerhead, in the middle of the ceiling. No shower stall, or even a curtain, just the showerhead in the middle with a drain under it. The roof was tile, the curved kind, and so there was ventilation all around the edges where the tiles came down in curves against the wall.

The other day I was trying to find any names or locations I could in my mission diary, and I have copies of all the transfers, so I had the address in Ponta Grossa. So I looked it up in Google Maps, and it offered me street view, so here is what I saw.

I can’t guarantee that it’s still there, the street view is from 2013, but likely it will still be there if I make a trip to Ponta Grossa.  Here is a picture from my mission with my first companion standing in front of our house on a preparation day after we had been to play soccer.

It’s exactly the same place. Some things don’t change, and that’s really scary. The back window was our room. There are places to live that make the Porto Alegre digs look elegant. This clearly is still one of them.